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On 13 July 2007, a French court has ruled against the French company DailyMotion, second world leader of video-sharing platforms after YouTube, in a counterfeit case. The legal action was initiated by the director, the producer, and the distributor of a movie put on-line by a user of the DailyMotion platform. The court decision is entirely based on the French law on the digital economy (LCEN), and not the copyright law (DADVSI). The LCEN provisions onISP liability are a direct transposition of the EU E-commerce Directive. This decision is likely to constitute a major turn in the legal qualification of web2.0 services.

The court acknowledges that DailyMotion is not a content provider as claimed

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In an unprecedented decision, the Court of First Instance in Bruxelles has order Scarlet, a Belgium ISP, to implement technical measures in order to prohibit its users to illegally download music files.

The decision comes after a complaint initiated in 2004 by Sabam (Belgian Society of Authors, Composers and Publishers) against the Belgium ISP Tiscali, now renamed as Scarlet. A first intermediary ruling of 26 November 2004 accepted the possibility for an ISP to disconnect customers if they violate copyrights, and block the access for all customers to websites offering file-sharing programs. But further technical clarifications were needed, so an expert was appointed in order to present its opinions.

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The video-sharing website Youtube, was blocked on 7 March 2007 by a court order in Turkey, after some videos insulting Turkey's founding father, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk had been uploaded on its servers. The ban was lifted two days later, when the videos were removed from the website.

Some of the videos, considered offending by the court, presented Ataturk and the Turkish people as homosexuals. In others, insults were proffered to the Turkish flag and Ataturk's portrait.

The court ordered the Turkish ISPs to block the video-sharing website, based on Article 301 from the Turkish Penal Code, known as the main obstacle to freedom of speech. Article 301 considers insulting Ataturk as

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Google has decided to settle with SOFAM and SCAM, two of the Belgian newspapers groups having sued the company for using excerpts from their articles in the Google News Belgium service.

SOFAM, a group representing the rights of photographers and SCAM, a group representing journalists, had joined Copiepresse which had decided to take legal action against Google in February, arguing that Google should have signed agreements with the Belgium newspapers for using snippets of and links to newspaper stories.

After the hearing in August 2006, a ruling obliged Goggle to remove the links to the Belgium newspapers sites from its Google News service threatening the company with a 1 million euro fine in case of

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The Appeal Court in Paris has decided that the French ISPs need to block the access to website AAARGH, considered as revisionist by the court. This decision was made even though the judges admitted that the measures would be imperfect and the site would still be accessible through other means as well.

The action was started by a number of French anti-racist groups that have first asked three US-based hosting providers to shut down the website of AAARGH. But one of them refused to shut down the website and therefore the anti-racist NGOs continued their action in the French court.

The 2004 French law that implements the EU E-commerce Directive gives the possibility to the plaintiffs, after all the possible measures to convince

A previous ruling of the Hamburg court that made moderators of internet forums liable for content posted on their sites is now contradicted by the Intermediate Court of Appeals in Dusseldorf which has ruled that forum operators are obligated to delete illegal comments made by their users only in case they know about them.

The ruling of the German Supreme Court of 2004 obliged the forum operators to prevent illegal content posted by their users but did not bind them to review all comments before being placed online. However, in the Heise Zeitschriften Verlag case, the Hamburg court ruled against Heise, asking from the publisher to monitor the content before it appeared online.

The Hamburg court had required the operator to "either increase its funding or limit ... its operations" in order to review all postings before

Following a fierce battle between an authority of the Italian State and private european online betting companies over their activity in Italy, a big number of betting websites are officialy blocked for Italian Internet users.

Everything began with the 2006 financial law (Law 266/2005) voted by the Parliament under the outgoing Berlusconi government. The law included four provisions - namely paragraph 535-58 of art.1 - which gave the Amministrazione Autonoma dei Monopoli di Stato (AAMS or Autonomous Administration of State Monopolies, a part of the Ministry of Economy and Finances) the power to bring to the attention of: (a) providers of Internet services, or (b) providers of other data or telecommunication networks, or (c) entities that offer networks or telecommunication services in

The Californian appeal court decided on 26 May that online journalists and bloggers have the same right to protect their sources as all other journalists. The case was brought to court by Apple Computer demanding from a number of news website operators to reveal the source of confidential information posted about some of its products.

Initially the trial court had ruled in favour of Apple but the appeal court changed this decision stating that the defendants were protected by California's reporter's shield law, as well as the constitutional privilege against disclosure of confidential sources.

A major point in the case was whether the writers involved deserved the protection of the First Amendment and the sites involved could be considered a "newspaper, magazine or other periodical publication" as it is expressed